Panasonic Case Study

Background

Panasonic, one of the worlds leading consumer electronics companies, was looking to expand their electronic marketing channels via the Internet. When most people think of Panasonic, they think about the millions of consumers around the world that purchase their electronic equipment such as DVD players, stereo equipment, etc. The majority of these products are sold to consumers via retailers such as Best Buy and Circuit City. Panasonic wanted to market directly to corporations and their employees – in effect setting up a Business to Business marketing channel. Panasonic select WebSphere Commerce Business Edition to provide the electronic catalog to their corporate customers while their SAP system provided the back-office fulfillment.

Panasonic wanted to setup custom stores for Dell, Continental Airlines, the US Olympic Committee and UPS. The key to this effort was that each corporate customer had specific contract pricing and was only authorized to purchase certain products. Panasonic needed a framework for putting this e-commerce strategy together and they looked to WebSphere Commerce as the supporting platform.

Problem

Panasonic like all major manufacturers faces challenges when wanting to market directly via the Internet. The biggest challenge being how not to create channel conflict with those companies that have been selling your product for years via their retail outlets – the Best Buys of the world. Panasonic realized that there were unique benefits to marketing directly to other larger corporations, but they weren’t going to market directly to consumers, which would have angered the major retailers.

Panasonic needed to create custom e-commerce sites for each of the corporations they were going to sell their products to. Panasonic had already negotiated which products and what price would be charged for each of the corporations. Panasonic also realized that in order for these specialized e-commerce stores to be profitable, they needed to be easily maintained and not require a lot of changes from the IS department. The goal was to have the product managers be able to control what products were available in each of the customized stores and allow them to input the negotiated contract prices.

Solution

Shared Vision Group working with the Panasonic team customized WebSphere Commerce Business Edition to support the requirements of Panasonic. This involved using the contract pricing and product set tables of WebSphere Commerce to create the “virtual stores” for each of the corporate customers Panasonic targeted – Dell, Continental Airlines, UPS, etc. In essence, Panasonic only had to install the WebSphere Commerce software once, but the employees of each of the above corporations, logged in to the same store but only saw those products and prices that had been setup for them.

Customizations were also made to the Administration interface of WebSphere Commerce to support the requirement that Product Managers be able to maintain the catalog, prices and product sets for each of the corporations. Publishing wizards were created to allow the promotion of new products to each of the catalogs.

MQ Series was utilized to allow orders to flow from WebSphere Commerce into SAP to support the fulfillment of the orders. This prevented the manual re-keying of orders into the back-office system.

New products created in SAP were automatically sent to the WebSphere Commerce server where they were loaded into temporary tables. The product managers could review the new products and determine whether or not they wanted to publish any of them to the custom stores they setup for each corporation.

Results and Benifits

Panasonic created a unique B2B marketing channel aimed at growing relationships with large corporations that weren’t effectively served by the large retailers where their products are typically found. In addition, management of the system was handled by the product managers requiring very little input from the IT group which allows for faster time to market, lower costs, and better margins in the end.